Death Penalty Digest

Cause for cheer in Connecticut but bad news from Bahrain in the latest installment of all the recent death penalty news from around the globe...

First to the Middle East where the ‘Arab Spring,’ as it is becoming known, has produced lots of troubling human rights issues. In Bahrain, four opposition protestors have been given the death penalty by a military court for allegedly murdering two police officers during the uprisings. Speaking on behalf of the European Union, which opposes the death penalty in all circumstances, Foreign Affairs Chief Baroness Ashton said that she was ‘deeply concerned’ about those people sentenced to death by the government.

In Egypt there has been lots of chatter popping up on the media alerts about the possibility – although it would seem to be unlikely – that Hosni Mubarak could be sentenced to death if found guilty and convicted of the deaths of protestors in the anti-government uprisings in Egypt earlier this year. The slew of stories stemmed from a comment made by Justice Minister, Mohammed al-Guindi who said ''The crime of killing demonstrators could lead him to the death penalty if he is proven guilty.''

Even more troublingly, Al-Guindi said that any civil protestors convicted of ‘thuggery and sectarian incitement’ could be punished with the death penalty.

As is always the case, articles about the death penalty in the USA have a tendency to dominate the media alerts. These articles are of hugely varied quality, mostly varied between bad and really terrible. Journalism about death penalty cases is often littered with mistakes, gaping holes and lies. One of the biggest problems is bias towards the prosecution and complete dehumanisation of the prisoner. This article is a blatant example, which discusses the conviction of Melvin Earl Forte, handed a sentence of death in California last week, with no balance or consideration of the defendant whatsoever.

One more down (hopefully), only another 33 to go…Good news comes from Connecticut where the Judiciary Committee passed a bill to repeal the death penalty, 27 votes to 17. The bill now must go to the house and senate and be signed by Governor Dan Molloy, but an article by the Associated Press seems to think that it has a good chance of passing.

In California, where the cost of keeping a person on death row is more than three times that of other prisoners, and where the state spends more on locking people up than on anything other than education, Governor Jerry Brown has announced that he is cancelling plans to build a new $356m death row just outside of San Francisco. Now, to cancel the death penalty, too…

So often Texas receives the unfortunate honour of throwing up some of the most disgraceful stories on the death penalty; they’ve come up trumps once again. Last month, reports the Houston Chronicle, psychologist George Denkowski had to be reprimanded by the state Board Examiners of Psychologists, fined $5000 and banned from performing evaluations in the future. Why? Because Denkowski was a psychologist favoured by state prosecutors for performing psychological evaluations that found mentally unwell defendants ‘qualified’ to be executed. When there is a question mark over a person’s mental competency to be executed (it is illegal in the USA to execute a person who isn’t capable of fully understanding the charges against them) they are evaluated to determine whether or not they are eligible for the death penalty. It was discovered that Denkowski’s methods, among other things, artificially raised a person’s IQ. While he was practising Denkowski evaluated 27 people and found the majority of them eligible for the death penalty. One has already been killed, a death that could have been prevented if Denkowski had been stopped earlier.

From the China Post, a very encouraging article on the reduced use of the death penalty in Taiwan and mainland China. Apparently these countries want to fall in line with international law and to move towards abolition.

In Uganda parliamentary hearings are being held on the odious anti-homosexuality bill, which, in its initial incarnation, included a provision for giving the death penalty to homosexuals. Yes, you did read that correctly. Although David Bahati who tabled the original bill said that he would consider taking the death penalty provision out (how gracious of him), much of the media reports suggest that the text remains in the bill currently being discussed.

And, finally, as I go through my media alerts there is often an alarming moment when I think that loads of footballers have been given the death penalty for some sort of awful massacre. Thankfully, it’s just google amalgamating ‘sudden death’ and ‘penalty shoot out’ articles into my media alerts. Phew.